US is making more enemies than it takes out – Iraq veteran

The Pentagon says Afghan militants have captured an American soldier in the east of the country. A hard-line Taliban breakaway faction, known as Haqqani, claims it has the officer.

He is believed to be the first member of the U.S. military to be taken hostage in either Afghanistan or Iraq for more than two years.

American troops have just started a large military offensive against the Taliban in the Helmand Province.

It's the first major operation since President Obama agreed to a large increase in U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.

But Iraq veteran and anti-war activist Adam Kokesh doesn't think the extra troops will do any good.

“What we need to do in Afghanistan is the same as what we need to do in Iraq – start to respect the right of other nations for self-determination, and the sovereignty of other nations that should be sovereign. One of the justifications of this new surge in Afghanistan is that some of the British troops, who are operating there, rely too much on air strikes that were causing too many civilian deaths. The answer to that is not ‘Let's put more troops on the ground and be more precise on who we are killing,’ it's ‘Let's stop killing people. Let's stop making enemies and start respecting the advice of our fathers and have a foreign policy of non-intervention, friendship and honest commerce with all nations’,” Kokesh says.

“Some of us – who were not hoping to get anything out of Obama in terms of real change – we are now very disappointed to see that his foreign policy now is even more aggressive. And in terms of the economic effects of this – the war in Iraq has cost more than $3 trillion. And you can't take as much manpower and material as we are investing in these occupations – we can't even call them global war on terror any more – without it affecting the US economy. What we're doing there is making enemies faster than we can kill them. No matter how swift a military victory you have in the context of an occupation, if you even kill all the 'right people', you're still going to end up pissing off a lot of the 'wrong people', innocent people. You are going to kill enough innocent people that you'll make more enemies than you have taken out,” he added.